By Aaron Mandel
There is a particular kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep. You have been holding something heavy for a long time now, and this morning you woke up before you wanted to, already braced for the day. The resolve you counted on yesterday is thin. You are not asking to feel triumphant; you only want to be able to stand up and meet what is in front of you without your knees giving way. The psalms know this exact place. They were written, again and again, by people whose strength had run low and who reached for a strength outside their own.
When your own resolve is not enough
Notice what the psalmist does not say. He does not say, “Be strong, because you have it in you.” He turns outward. “Wait on the LORD; Be strong, and let thy heart take courage; Yea, wait thou for the LORD.” (Psalms 27:14) The strength and the courage are real, but they are framed by waiting, by leaning on Someone who does not run out the way you do. The same verse returns almost word for word elsewhere, as if the tradition wanted to press it into you twice: “Be strong, and let your heart take courage, All ye that wait for the LORD.” (Psalms 31:25)
This matters because on a hard day the worst pressure is often the private command to manufacture courage from nothing. The psalms lift that burden. They tell you the heart can take courage precisely because it is not the heart’s own supply being drawn down. You are invited to wait, which is a strange instruction for someone who feels they must keep moving. Yet waiting, here, is not passivity. It is the act of refusing to anchor your steadiness in your own thinning reserves.
Where strength actually lives
If your courage is not finally your own, then where does it come from? Psalm 62 answers plainly, and it is worth sitting with the whole movement of it: “He only is my rock and my salvation, My high tower, I shall not be moved. Upon God resteth my salvation and my glory; The rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God. Trust in Him at all times, ye people; Pour out your heart before Him; God is a refuge for us. Selah” (Psalms 62:7-9) The image is architectural. A rock, a high tower, a refuge. These are not feelings you summon; they are places you go.
The classical teachers understood that even bending the will toward God in a moment of weakness is itself an act of strength. The Tzava’at HaRivash puts it as direct counsel for the moment when you feel you cannot pray, cannot rise, cannot continue: “Nonetheless, even though you are unable, push yourself with all your strength; many times during a single prayer, if necessary, until you bond to HaShem, the Creator, blessed is His Name.” (Tzava'at HaRivash 58:1) The strength asked of you is not the strength to carry the weight alone. It is the smaller, truer strength to keep turning toward the One who carries it with you.
And there is a sobering counterpart that guards you from the wrong kind of self-reliance. The prophet names how unreliable raw human power is: “And flight shall fail the swift, And the strong shall not exert his strength, Neither shall the mighty deliver himself.” (Amos 2:14) This is not meant to crush you. It is meant to redirect you. The swift, the strong, the mighty, all of them fail when leaning only on themselves. You are simply being told the truth earlier than they learned it.
Strength when the heart itself is failing
Sometimes the failure is not external. The trouble is not only the circumstance but the way your own inner life has begun to give out under it. The body grows heavy, the mind dull, the resolve frayed. The psalmist does not pretend otherwise. He pours out his complaint and then keeps speaking to God anyway: “Trust in Him at all times, ye people; Pour out your heart before Him; God is a refuge for us. Selah” (Psalms 62:9) The phrase is “at all times,” not “when you feel strong.” Pouring out your heart is permitted in the low hours; it is, in fact, where the verse points you first.
The mussar tradition treats joy and strength as close kin, and warns that a service of God done in heaviness is missing something it was meant to have. The Mesillat Yesharim records the divine complaint: “We find that the Holy One, blessed be He, complained to the Jewish people for lacking this condition in their service, as written: ‘because you did not serve the L-rd, your G-d, with joy and gladness of heart’ (Devarim 28:47).” (Mesillat Yesharim 19:103) You may read that and feel accused on a day when joy is impossible. Read it instead as an invitation. The strength the psalms offer is not grim endurance; it is meant, over time, to soften back into a kind of gladness, even if today you can only manage the first step toward it.
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Courage built by remembering
One of the quiet engines of psalmic courage is memory. The psalmist steadies present fear by recalling what God has already done. This is why the tradition asks you to carry the words inward rather than leave them on the page. The first treatise of Duties of the Heart describes exactly this folding-in: “And these words, which I command you this day, shall be on your heart, which means to cleave them to your heart, and believe them in your inner being.” (Duties of the Heart, First Treatise on Unity, Introduction:7) A verse held only in the eyes evaporates by noon. A verse cleaved to the heart can be reached for in the dark.
The same author gives a striking measure for how tightly you might bind a thing to yourself. Writing of love and devotion, the Tzava’at HaRivash says: “Therefore, your love of your wife should be like your love of your Tefillin, through which you bind your heart and mind to HaShem.” (Tzava'at HaRivash 101:5) The binding is the point. A strength-psalm is not a slogan you glance at. It is something you wind around your heart and mind until, on the morning you wake already braced, it is the first word that surfaces.
Making a strength-psalm your own
So how do you actually use one? Choose a single verse and let it become the thing you say before the hard task, not after it. “Be strong, and let your heart take courage, All ye that wait for the LORD” (Psalms 31:25) is short enough to carry through a clenched morning. Say it before the phone call, before the room, before the doorway you do not want to walk through. Repetition is not superstition here; it is the slow cleaving of words to the heart that the tradition describes.
And widen the lens past your own situation. The close of Psalm 62 sets all human strength against God’s: “Upon God resteth my salvation and my glory; The rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God. Trust in Him at all times, ye people; Pour out your heart before Him; God is a refuge for us. Selah Men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie; If they be laid in the balances, they are together lighter than vanity.” (Psalms 62:8-10) The powerful and the powerless alike weigh nothing against the rock you are leaning on. That is not a verse to make you small. It is a verse to make your fear small.
If you keep a journal through a hard season, let one psalm of strength run through it like a thread. Write the verse at the top of the page on the worst days and underneath it, in a few honest lines, where your courage actually stood and where it gave way. Over weeks you will see the pattern the psalmists saw: that strength borrowed and returned to, day after day, slowly becomes a steadiness you did not have when the season began. You were never asked to be the rock. You were only asked to keep going back to it.
Published by Higgayon Press. For questions of halacha, consult a qualified rabbi.